An unexpected development has taken place in the seven-decades-long dispute between the Tibetan exile leadership and China’s government. In early July, for the first time since 2010, Chinese authorities reportedly held direct talks with the exile Tibetan political leadership, based in Dharamsala, India. The meeting in July followed a year or more of back-channel contacts of some kind.
These talks are at only a very preliminary stage and may not last. Beijing has not confirmed that it has had contact with the exiles, and the exile leaders have downplayed any prospect of substantive outcomes, professing interest only in long-term developments. But behind these reports are signs of a larger and more intriguing shift. This is indicated, according to the exile leadership, by the fact that it was China that initiated the resumption of talks. They “are reaching out to us, it’s not us reaching out to them,” as the exiles’ Sikyong, or political leader, Penpa Tsering, has put it. Beijing, the exiles argue, now finds itself under pressure to reach a deal with the exiled Tibetan religious leader, the 89-year-old Dalai Lama, before his health declines further. If so, this would be a 180-degree reversal from the previous dynamics of the dispute, when it was the exiles who were urgently, even desperately, seeking a settlement before time runs out.
The exiles’ new assessment of China’s diplomatic calculus seems ambitious, given that it implies a significant weakening in China’s bargaining power on Tibet. But there is some evidence to support this view. It follows from a fundamental shift in the exiles’ strategy from a focus on human rights violations to a focus on flaws within China’s claim to sovereignty over Tibet.
From Human Rights to Sovereignty
Since the late 1970s, the main approach pursued by the Dalai Lama, his political counterparts in Dharamsala, and his supporters around the world has been the promotion of Western-led criticisms of China’s human rights record in Tibet. These criticisms have been intended to persuade China to give Tibetans some degree of meaningful autonomy. This has not worked. Despite Western pressure and major concessions by the exiles, Beijing stonewalled previous talks with the Tibetans, cut off formal contact for some 14 years, embarked on policies in Tibet and other ethnic areas that are all but indistinguishable from forced assimilation, and now says that it will not discuss enhanced autonomy for Tibet. Given the rise of China as a global power and the increasing failure of Western governments regarding their own claimed values, the prospects of success for a values-based, Western-led approach to diplomacy with Beijing are vanishingly small.
The recent shift in exile rhetoric suggests a realization by the Tibetan leadership that a strategy based on critiques of China’s human rights record in Tibet was never going to work. Instead, the new approach replaces moral chastisement with a critique of China’s claim to Tibet. Unlike human rights criticisms, a challenge to its sovereignty addresses a core sensitivity for the Chinese government. Its primary objective on the Tibet issue in the last 40 years had nothing to do with rebutting criticisms of its record on human rights, which probably never represented more than background noise for Beijing. Instead, its primary objective has always been to get all governments to state that Tibet is part of China. It took China just short of a century to achieve that goal—it was only in October 2008 that the British government renounced its 1914 treaty-based recognition of Tibet as a distinct political entity, ending its position as the final nation in the world not to have acknowledged China’s sovereignty over Tibet.
The new exile strategy assumes that the Party-state’s concern about its sovereignty in Tibet is so acute that even the possibility of moves to weaken foreign recognition of its claim will lead it to accept a reasonable settlement with the exiles. This approach underlay the visit by Nancy Pelosi and six other U.S. congressional representatives to India to meet the Dalai Lama in mid-June. The speeches of the U.S. visitors were filled with the usual bluster about ideological combat and American moral superiority. The delegates, however, carried with them the text of a bill just passed by Congress that spelled out the basic parameters of the exiles’ new approach. The “Promoting a Resolution to the Tibet-China Conflict Act,” more colloquially known as the “Resolve Tibet Act,” received presidential assent on July 12, despite Chinese condemnation. The act repeats the exiles’ long-standing demand that China hold “substantive dialogue” with the Dalai Lama, leading to a “negotiated agreement.” The Act, however, scarcely mentions issues of human rights abuses in Tibet. As the Chinese media immediately realized, the Act’s purpose is to cast doubt on China’s claim to sovereignty in Tibet. If China continues to delay an acceptable settlement with the Dalai Lama, the Act implies, Congress will push the U.S. government to downgrade its recognition of the legal status of Tibet to one that “remains to be determined.”
Backdating Claims
On one level, this is just another instance of U.S. congressional activism that Chinese leaders will see as typical interference in their country’s affairs, and as a largely hollow threat to its security. Indeed, the U.S. government has already ostensibly rebuffed the congressional approach, in that President Biden’s assent to the bill conspicuously foregrounded the aim of “advancing the human rights of Tibetans,” and restated U.S. recognition of “the Tibet Autonomous Region and other Tibetan areas of China as part of the People’s Republic of China.”
But the exiles’ new strategy involves disaggregating two types of interstate recognition of a territorial claim—it differentiates recognition of current sovereignty from recognition of a historical claim. The Resolve Tibet Act does not dispute China’s current sovereignty in Tibet (nor does the Dalai Lama) as a consequence of Beijing’s “effective control” there since the 1950s. Instead, it focuses on the rejection of China’s historical claim. President Biden’s statement only reaffirmed recognition of China’s current rule; it made no mention of the historical claim. The Resolve Tibet Act thus opens up the possibility that the exiles and their allies could persuade governments, while accepting China’s current sovereignty, to distance themselves from the historical basis for that claim.
The exile approach has potential because it also exposes a major weakness in China’s historical claim to Tibet. The Chinese government, in asserting that claim, has always refuted any suggestion that its legitimacy there is based on conquest or on effective administration of the territory. It cannot point to popular demand as a basis for its legitimacy, since it has never held a referendum or obtained a mandate from the Tibetan people for its absorption of their country into China. It therefore rests its claim to sovereignty on the argument that Tibet became part of China in the past. This claim is problematic. Tibet was certainly a part of empires in the past that were centered in China, a fact that the government in Beijing has used repeatedly as the basis for its claim. But Tibet was never part of a country called China, never became a Chinese province, was de facto independent in the first half of the 20th century, and was not directly ruled by Beijing until the 1950s.
The Resolve Tibet Act argues accordingly that “Tibet has maintained throughout its history…a separate and sovereign political and territorial identity.” As evidence, it cites the U.S. recognition of Tibetan neutrality during World War II, and the fact that “a number of countries including the United States, Mongolia, Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal, India, Japan, Great Britain, and Russia recognized Tibet as an independent nation or dealt with Tibet independently of any Chinese government.”
There is, however, a much more problematic weakness in China’s argument that it has sovereignty over Tibet: Beijing keeps changing the date when it claims that sovereignty over Tibet began.
Before the 1950s, many Chinese scholars had said that Tibet came under Chinese rule in the 18th century. (That was during the Qing Dynasty, when the Manchus, who are not Han Chinese, ruled China and its empire.) Since the late 1950s, however, Beijing has said that Tibet was formally incorporated into China in the 13th century, when China was ruled by the Yuan Dynasty (whose emperors were Mongolian, not Han Chinese). But in 2011, Beijing declared that what had happened to Tibet in the 13th century was only the “formal incorporation” of Tibet within China. Tibet, this new argument went, had been part of China “since ancient times.” This referred to cultural and genetic ties, rather than to Chinese administration in Tibet, a claim the government had never advanced before. In April 2015, that position changed again: a government White Paper announced that the phrase “since ancient times” meant that Tibet had become “a local government of ancient China” in the 7th century.
This was an unprecedented claim, one that Beijing has so far produced little argument or evidence to support. This revisionism is central to the negotiation issue. Chinese officials have consistently held that their primary precondition for talks with the Dalai Lama is that he must declare that Tibet is part of China. The Dalai Lama acceded to that demand shortly after it was first made in 1979 and gave up calls for independence. But the Chinese Communist Party is particularly sensitive about historical issues—its legitimacy claim is based on a narrative of restoring China’s territorial integrity after what it describes as a “Century of Humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers. In addition, it seems to recognize that its historical claim to Tibet is weak. So, at some point in or around the 1980s, Beijing quietly changed the terms of its preconditions for talks with the Dalai Lama. Without saying so in public, it began requiring the Tibetan leader to also state that Tibet was part of China in the past.
The Dalai Lama has not conceded that demand. He has declined to change his views on Tibetan history, saying that historical questions should be left aside and not be part of any talks (ironically, Beijing had insisted on much the same position in talks with the Tibetans in the 1980s). The reason that Chinese officials have accused the Dalai Lama of being a hypocrite and a “splittist” is thus not because he does not accept that Tibet is now part of China. It is because he has not said that Tibet became legally a part of China in whichever century or millennium is defined by Beijing as the start date of its claim to ownership—a date that keeps changing.
The Tibetans’ new stance towards negotiations takes Beijing’s goalpost-shifting as a political opportunity. The Resolve Tibet Act thus focuses on China’s new demand that the Dalai Lama declare that Tibet has been part of China “since ancient times,” rejects that claim, and asserts (correctly) that the U.S. government has never recognized such a claim. Indeed, it could hardly have done so, since that claim has only just been made.
Problems for China on Succession
The exiles’ focus, and that of the U.S. Congress, is thus on a contradiction within China’s sovereignty claim. But it is not the only contradiction within China’s Tibet policies that is emerging as the Dalai Lama ages. A series of core Tibet-related policy decisions by Beijing are now starting to appear as unforced errors, the results of overreach by Chinese policymakers.
One of these unforced errors in China’s Tibet policy concerns the Dalai Lama succession issue. Chinese officials and state media have made clear that the government’s major target regarding Tibet is to have sole control over the selection of the next Dalai Lama. It did not have to claim that power—there are myriad other ways the Communist Party could defang anyone who might emerge as the leader of the tiny Tibetan community-in-exile in the future. But for the Party to appoint its own candidate as the 15th Dalai Lama and convince Tibetans to accept that person would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve. (In the past, Tibetans too have frequently faced major internal disputes over the nomination of one or another child as a reincarnated lama.) The opposition of the U.S. or other Western governments to such efforts to control the succession will surely not deter Beijing on this issue, but support by the majority of Tibetans in Tibet will be crucial to its success. And the Party has never succeeded in its previous attempts to promote Tibetan religious leaders as effective proxies for its rule in Tibet.
Beijing’s most notable failure to install a lama as its proxy involved the 10th Panchen Lama, who was made the nominal leader of Tibet in 1959: In 1962 he criticized China’s Tibet policies and then ended up either under house arrest or in prison for much of the next two decades. Before his death in 1989, he again made major criticisms of China’s role in Tibet. In 1992, the Party tried to establish another leading lama, the 17th Karmapa, as its figurehead in Tibet, only for him to flee abroad seven years later. Since 1995 Beijing has been trying to get Tibetans to accept its appointee as the 11th Panchen Lama, but when he visited Tibet last August, the public gave him a noticeably tepid reception.
This record suggests that the only way for the Party to install a credible successor would be to get endorsement from the current Dalai Lama for its right to appoint one. I have heard reports from members of the exile community in India that Chinese officials are already trying to wrest such a concession from the Dalai Lama. But the Party would also have to make concessions to get such a deal. In other words, the government in Beijing may have backed itself into a strategic cul-de-sac from which it cannot easily escape without a genuine settlement with the exiled Tibetan leadership. And this is happening just as Dharamsala becomes less eager to conclude a deal.
Insults and Delay‚ Other Unforced Errors?
There are two other factors that might now be pushing China to negotiate an agreement with the Dalai Lama before it is too late. These too appear to be the result of unforced errors by the Party, and in these cases we know there were voices in Beijing that long ago warned China’s leaders to avoid them.
The first of these errors is the most obvious, and for that reason, has almost never been noticed abroad: The Chinese government never needed to switch to a policy of personally insulting the Dalai Lama. Top leaders made the decision at the Third National Forum on Work in Tibet in July 1994, against the advice of many of its own experts on Tibet. Popular resentment among Tibetans against that decision led to major protests across the Tibet plateau in 2008, and the policy is likely to lead to greater resentment when the Dalai Lama dies, unless China has brokered a reasonable agreement with him before then. The Party indeed appears concerned about the risk of serious unrest at that time; since 2011 20,000 cadres have been stationed in teams of four or more to live in every village in Tibet, apparently to prepare for such an outcome. A last-minute deal with the Dalai Lama would remove that risk, but may now be hard to broker in time.
The Party’s second strategy in Tibet that now looks more like a vulnerability is brinkmanship: Between 2002 and 2010, China’s leaders delegated talks with the exiles to an agency called the United Front, a network of organizations used by the Party to influence non-Party groups inside and outside China. But the United Front officials basically stalled the talks process by impugning the intentions of the Tibetan side, irrespective of the concessions that they made to Beijing’s demands. (Chinese officials are still doing so.) It became hard not to conclude that the Party’s strategy was to wait for the Dalai Lama to be at his weakest and oldest in order to maximize the concessions he would grant. But now that the window of opportunity for the Party is closing, it is, as the Tibetan leadership sees it, the Party rather than the exile leadership that is under pressure to reach a settlement.
Penpa Tsering, elected as the Sikyong of the government-in-exile in 2021, thus admits to little enthusiasm for the current talks. As he put it in April this year, “we have no immediate expectations…[and] to hope for something at this juncture…is not realistic.” This cooling of Tibetan views is a reasonable consequence of Beijing’s strategy over the last four decades of never giving Tibetans any gain from previous talks. Beijing continues that approach today, saying again in April that it will only talk about terms on which the current Dalai Lama and his circle could return. In this context, Penpa Tsering’s studied lack of interest in the talks is an innovative way of signaling to Beijing that its long-term negotiating strategy with the Tibetans has turned into another own goal, reducing incentives for Tibetans to consider more concessions.
This display of political jiujitsu by the Tibetan exiles is a striking conceptual adjustment, but it is not a shift in political realities or power. The Party still holds all the cards, and even if the U.S. government became openly involved, it could not force the Chinese government to yield on the Tibet issue; it could indeed have the reverse effect. India’s position will be more significant, but its support for the exiles is likely to become much less assertive if Beijing follows through with its current softening toward New Delhi on the border question.
The significance of the shift in the Tibetan approach is thus not that it might lead to a visible change in China’s negotiating stance. It is that, behind the scenes, it might strengthen those advisers within Beijing who warned their leaders 30 years ago that a policy of insulting the Dalai Lama, of delaying talks until just before he dies, and of imposing unpopular or unknown figures as religious leaders would eventually damage China’s own interests.
Already, there are signs of internal tensions within the Tibet policy elite. China’s former Party Secretary in Tibet was investigated for corruption and then expelled from the Party this year, an unprecedented development in the Tibetan context. The likely background to the investigation is some form of factional struggle, and the rumors are that this is related to policy implementation in Tibet. The exiles’ new focus on internal contradictions in China’s Tibet policies may not in itself lead to change in those policies, let alone concessions. But, by focusing on the Party-state’s objectives and their contradictions rather than on values or on Western-backed ideological critiques, the new approach to the dispute could prompt reassessment by both sides of their strategic options before the final opportunity for a negotiated settlement is lost.